Rutger Hauer

  • Nighthawks (1981)

    Nighthawks (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) Twenty-first century reviews of Nighthawks have generally been kinder to the film than the ones it received at the time of its release, and it’s not hard to see why. In some ways, the film was ahead of its time, by maybe ten or twenty years: As a suspense story of how a cowboy Manhattan cop goes after a terrorist attacking New York landmarks, it shows many of the characteristics of late-1980s/1990s action movies as the form coalesced in the wake of New Hollywood. That it features none other than Sylvester Stallone with a fetching beard as the cop (plus Billy Dee Williams) and Rutger Hauer as the mad terrorist is a clear bonus, considering the career that both of them had later on, especially in the very kinds of movies that Nighthawks announced. The film does manage to get quite a few things right: the atmosphere of wintertime Manhattan is very well presented, and the standout sequence in the film (aside from an opening store bombing sequence that would become a staple of later action movies, such as Die Hard with a Vengeance) is a tense and still rather original sequence set aboard and around the Roosevelt Island Tramway with Stallone’s character talking with the terrorists. I wouldn’t want to oversell the film: Nighthawks may point the way forward that many more action films would follow, but it’s only semi-successful in its approach. Making a protagonist out of a cowboy cop is increasingly troublesome, the ending sequence is nonsensical and the film does feel a bit slow by contemporary standards. But it has aged better than other films at the time, and Stallone isn’t as annoying here as he is in other films. (A look at the production history of the film does reveal that he was already then showing the signs of being a troublesome star, but that’s Hollywood’s problem, not ours.)  Considering how it has faded from cultural memory, Nighthawks is now a bit of a pleasant surprise, and more interesting than expected.

  • “Screen One” Hostile Waters (1997)

    “Screen One” Hostile Waters (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) It’s rare for a TV movie to take on real-life military history, especially in as rarified a field as submarines. On the other hand, it does seem like a nice fit—If you’re going to go for military intrigue, what cheapest way to do it than with limited sets and a bit of murky CGI to make up the exteriors? Accordingly, BBC production Hostile Waters offers a number of familiar actors in lead roles, starting with Rutger Hauer and Martin Sheen as duelling submarine captains, with supporting roles for Max von Sydow and Colm Feore. Much of the film professes to reflect the truth of the real-life K-219 incident — in which a Soviet submarine suffered a catastrophic malfunction near the eastern seaboard—, based on a book digging into events never formally acknowledged. The result will certainly appeal more to submarine buffs—it does look and feel a lot like other submarine movies (starting with K-19 The Widowmaker), and the limited production values are somewhat offset by good actors and a script that places some emphasis on plausibility. As a submarine film, Hostile Waters is overshadowed by more illustrious theatrically released films, but it holds its own decently enough.

  • The Hitcher (1986)

    The Hitcher (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) Narrative plausibility is usually a good thing when it comes to movies, but there are exceptions, and The Hitcher sure knows how to play with it. Starting out when a young man picks up an unusually intense hitchhiker in the middle of the desert, the film quickly dives into a nightmare once the hitcher promises violent death to the protagonist, and starts toying with him in broad day light—framing him for terrible murders, blowing up gas stations and helicopters, breaking in and out of prison and doing so with a determination that would exhaust even the Terminator. Halfway in the film, it’s fully justifiable to think that our protagonist has escaped rational thought and that the Hitcher (an icy performance from Rutger Hauer) is a figment of his imagination. But no—quickly enough, The Hitcher firmly establishes that the hitcher can be seen by the other characters and that may make him even scarier, because the film imperceptibly shifts from a psychological thriller to something akin to supernatural horror. The impossible events of the film can only be explained by non-natural means even if there are no overt fantasy elements. I’m not so fond of the film’s grand-guignolesque level of violence (killing the most sympathetic of the characters along the way), but it does help the film’s nightmarish atmosphere. Disappointingly enough, the version of The Hitcher that HBO broadcast on the eve of Halloween had a low-resolution muddy matted visual presentation—surely there’s a high-definition version lurking somewhere in their archives?

  • Blade Runner (1982)

    Blade Runner (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On Blu-ray, November 2016) I have watched Blade Runner at least once before, but it was a long time ago and I can’t guarantee that it was in one single sitting. It was probably in the mid-nineties, at a time when I was diving deep into nerd culture and the film was de rigueur viewing—the only accepted conclusion to watching the film was to brand it an undeniable classic. Actually sitting down to watch its Final Cut in one gulp twenty years later, however, I find myself somewhat more reserved. Oh, it’s still a good film, especially when measured against the Science Fiction movies of that time: It’s considerably more mature, refined and ambiguous. From today’s perspective, however, it’s not quite as fresh. There are (especially on Blu Ray) annoying differences between the image quality of the shots, sometimes grainy, sometimes blurred. The special effects are limited and used sparingly (even often literally repeated), the themes have been reused almost endlessly since then, and the pacing is notably slack—by the time the classic ending came by, I was surprised at how little had happened. This isn’t to take away from its achievement, but to put it in context as a tremendously influential film. While the vision of a multicultural rain-soaked neon-lit Los Angeles was, at the time, unlike anything else, it crossed over to cliché roughly twenty-five years ago. It’s a testimony to director Ridley Scott, as well as to actors Harrison Ford, Sean Young and Rutger Hauer that the film still holds up today even after inspiring so many other works. In a way, the fact that we can’t watch Blade Runner in the same way today than in 1982 proves how much of a classic it is. But as a film, it’s not perfect—so mark me down as nominally interested in the idea of next year’s sequel.

  • Fatherland (1994)

    Fatherland (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, March 2012) Trying to deliver alternate history on a TV-movie budget is a tough assignment, so it’s best to remain indulgent while tackling HBO’s adaptation of Robert Harris’ celebrated thriller.  A murder mystery set in an alternate 1964 in which the Nazis reign triumphant over Europe, Fatherland focuses on the investigation of an honest SS officer trying to figure out the common link between a number of murders.  The visual look of the film is intentionally dated, as if it was a sixties film rather than a mid-nineties TV production.  Given the budget, the viewer shouldn’t expect much in terms of alternate-universe eye-candy: many swastikas, two or three alt-Berlin matte paintings and a curiously disturbing scene in which Nazis have punch-card computers at their disposal.  Fatherland shares a number of problems with Harris’ novel: The entire story is built upon a revelation that the viewer already knows –a mark of some naiveté in the alternate-universe genre.   The construction of the story is also fairly standard, leaving to a number of imposed scenes in which the expected occurs in pretty much the accepted fashion.  But the film introduces a number of extra problems that make it worse and worse the closer it gets to a conclusion.  Not only does it dispense with the elegiac ending of the novel, but it tries to tries up all loose ends nicely with a fantastically improbable appeal to authority, and then with a twenty-years-later voiceover.  (It also features a divorced father trying to kidnap his kid away from his mother –but hey, that’s the moral leniency we’re supposed to give to protagonists.)  It amounts to a bit of a curiosity; a bog-standard thriller set in an unusual alternate-history framework, with some intriguing images along the way to a disappointing conclusion.  Rutger Hauer is fine as the lead detective, while Miranda Richardson is unexplainably annoying as the American journalist running around and getting in trouble by not showing a shred of cleverness.  But then again, that’s how the script goes: All ham-fisted exposition and transparent character emotions.  Fatherland is worth a look for the curiosity value, but it’s not exactly a good movie.

  • Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

    Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, April 2011) Second full feature to emerge from the Grindhouse trailers, Hobo with a Shotgun proudly embraces its exploitation raison d’être and delivers an old-fashioned schlocky action B-movie.  Shot in Nova Scotia (and partially financed with Canadian tax dollars), this conscious attempt to re-create violent movies from the eighties straddles a fine line between ironic comedy and earnest mayhem.  The title is the plot of the film, set in a city that recalls the worst paranoid fantasies about New York at its lowest point of urban decay: It’s useless to discuss narrative coherence in a film that’s not meant to have much of it.  Fortunately, the exploitation-movie tone is well-captured: While the film is extremely gory, the violence feels more absurdly ridiculous than disgusting –and considering that an element of the climax is a lead character stabbing a villain with the exposed bones of a maimed arm, that’s saying something.  In-between the overdone synth-heavy score, spitting melodrama, garish colors, buckets of blood, grainy pictures and ham-fisted sequences of gratuitous evil, it goes without saying that this film will appeal to a certain viewership: It takes a special kind of cinematographic literacy to enjoy the retro-VHS atmosphere that make up this film’s peculiar charm.  Rutger Hauer growls his way expertly in the title role, while the villains make faces at the camera and Molly Dunsworth does her job just looking cute.  The end could have used an epilogue, there are a few underwhelming sequences in the mix and it would have been nice if, like Machette, the film could have included some deeper social relevance, but otherwise, it’s hard to think of a recent film that achieves its aim as surely as Hobo with a Shotgun… even if those aims are far, far below those of respectable cinema.